Fall Window Box Ideas and Pictures

Of all your outdoor planters, it's the window boxes that will be on full display throughout the year. If your box doesn't look good, your house won't shine. Front yard boxes and container plants should be well designed, with plants changed out every season or more often to keep the display fresh. If flowers are spent, leggy, dried out, and it looks like you're growing a doll-sized tumbleweed patch, it's time to either get rid of the box or learn how to arrange the right plants for your region and for the right season.

Here are 17 diverse and beautiful window boxes to give you ideas for fall.

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Urban Boxes

Botanical Blitz

The Minneapolis-based design firm Botanical Blitz focuses on outdoor floral arrangements and displays, creating growing works of art and changing out plants for clients each season or more often. Large planters on an urban deck featuring eye-catching plants like lime green sweet potato vine (Ipomea), ornamental grasses, mums, coreopsis, and trailing needlepoint ivy.

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Kale and Mums

Botanical Blitz

Yellow chrysanthemums, dwarf ornamental grasses, and ornamental kale provide rich, deep tones of autumn. Small pumpkins are tucked in as a reminder that Halloween and pumpkin pies are around the corner.

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Autumn Greens

Q is for Quandie

Jester's Crown fern, green and white caladium, white mums, cut Annabelle hydrangea flowers, dried Astilbe flowers, frilly ornamental kale, and a fat white pumpkin create a variety of textures and greens in a fall window box arrangement by Linda of Q is for Quandie. She recommends this arrangement for early fall up until frost; the first hard frost will kill the caladium.

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Tulip Substitutes

Pretty Pink Tulips

Since tulips don't grow in the fall, Elizabeth of Pretty Pink Tulips keeps the trailing ivy and other plants in her window box, going for an easy update with mums and pumpkins.

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Hydrangea Filler

Hoosier Homemade

Liz Latham of Hoosier Homemade likes to use odd numbers (a good design rule) for her Indiana home's window boxes. For fall, she uses larger pumpkins and gourds in the middle and at each end, mum plants, and dried hydrangea flowers tucked into a bed of hay and dried grasses that spill over the box for a fun look.

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Lavender and White

Bria Hammel Interiors

Bria Hammel Interiors, based in Mendota Heights, Minnesota, created a stunning lavender/purple and white autumn window box using chrysanthemums, different varieties of ornamental kale and cabbage, white pumpkins, and pale gourds.

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Cottage Design

Cottage at the Crossroads

Jane and Leo Windham of Cottage at the Crossroads are do-it-yourselfers who love to make beautiful things happen in their yard. Their fall window box includes gourds grown in the garden, English ivy, creeping Jenny, foxtail fern (asparagus fern), and annual additions of orange marigolds.

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Reminders of Late Summer

Spencer Means / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0

Snapdragons, million bells, sweet alyssum, and purple pansies grace a brick red-colored window box on Church Street in Charleston, South Carolina.

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Box of Whimsy

Lori L. Stalteri / Flickr / CC BY 2.0

A few mainstays remain along with the mushroom-shaped garden ornaments, but this box is freshened up for fall with yellow-orange coreopsis, ornamental peppers, red-stemmed euphorbia (spurge), pimply yellow gourds, and cream and orange mini pumpkins.

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Multicolored Mums

Botanical Blitz

Rust-orange, yellow, and lilac mums are teamed with beautiful deep-purple million bells (Calibrachoa) and a pumpkin for a charming arrangement.

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Bay Window Beauty

Spencer Means / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0

A bay window is adorned with three window boxes, each planted identically with ornamental grasses that create a fountain effect, trailing sweet potato vine, and creeping Jenny.

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Dazzling Succulents

Lisa Hallett Taylor

In some parts of the southwestern United States and other regions with mild winters, succulents thrive outdoors throughout the year. A window box planted in autumn with colorful succulents will grow during the winter and produce flowers in early spring. This box features a variegated pelargonium (the red and green leaves; not a succulent), flower-like Aeonium, blue-chalk Senecio, and Duddleya.

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Pretty Pumpkins All in a Row

Indigo Gardens and Design

Beth Schelle of Indigo Gardens and Design in South Bend, Indiana, places gourds and pumpkins in various patterns, colors, and shapes in a long window box. Evergreens and arborvitae are tucked in to soften the look and transition to winter.

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Crotons and Chrysanthemums

Botanical Blitz

Dark pink and purple chrysanthemums are planted with tropical-looking, leather-leaf crotons, which make a striking backdrop.

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Design Strategy

Flo's Flowers / Brooklyn Window Boxes

Florence and Cecelia of Brooklyn Window Boxes by Flo's Gardens have designed outdoor containers for many years and know what they are doing. In the back go the taller grasses or shrub-like plants, while two mid-size plants fill the middle. Up front, three smaller trailing or spilling plants form a mix of flowers and greenery. Their results are stunning foot traffic-stopping displays for each season.

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Simple Geraniums

Lori L. Stalteri / Flickr / CC BY 2.0

Geraniums are hardy and can live for decades. Pruning spent flowers will keep your geraniums looking their best—a must for window boxes that everyone passing by will see. A classic red geranium (actually a pelargonium) shares space with yellow lantana and blue salvia, which all continue to bloom in early fall.